Fiber Outage in Inner Richmond SF

[Sonic_issue]

Is anyone else experiencing an outage in 94121 area of San Francisco? We have been unable to connect since this morning (more than 8 hours now!) as the service light has remained red. Although customer support has been polite and quick to reach, they do not have any detailed status updates aside from that it’s being worked on. It was confirmed it’s relatively widespread across a couple streets so I’m disappointed to see Sonic does not have a general status update page or more details on when this can be resolved when it’s almost been a full day.

[mike.perlas]

We do in fact have a page for such updates! You can get updates on this and future events at https://sonicstatus.com/

Sorry for the inconvenience! We are actively working on this outage.

[dane]

Sorry for the down-time, it's certainly not typical for fiber optic networks. In this case, I understand we've got about 150 customers offline at this time, as a result of a fire on a utility pole which damaged a number of cables. It's a complex repair, and is likely to require some overnight work to take offline far more customers to cut out the damaged section of cable. I'll be interested to learn more from our team about the cause of the fire, if the pole was replaced, etc, and we'll share that info when it's available.

[karlhorton]

I'm in the outer Richmond and have no service this morning. The status lights on my small
white box show green for LAN and nothing for FIBER.

I fired up my mobile hotspot on my phone and went to https://sonicstatus.com/ from my laptop.

I saw likely info in the status page, with a revised ETA of 3pm, but it seemed very general.

I put a support call in, and got the info about the fire from the rep, and he confirmed my address was affected.

It would have saved the call if sonic had written "94121 area code affected by a fire: eta blah"

[tonytran2435]

My gigabit fiber service light is also illuminated red as well and after doing manual resetting nothing has changed and I am left with no internet using my cellular data to go online and leave my comment here. I hope this gets fixed soon.

[karlhorton]

Confirming restored at 3pm

[mauromoura]

My internet is Down again. I have not experienced internet outage for many years with cable. I switched last Wednesday and I see my router failing constantly till all day today. 5:42pm NOT WORKING.

[m.harmon]

Mauromoura, sorry about that. Are you still down?

[dane]

The cause of the outage was an optical fiber which was destroyed by a fire on the pole. The fire was an electrical fire caused by a fault in a streetlight, which ignited a wooden guard-arm on the pole. That burning wood arm swung down and rested on the Sonic cable, destroying it.

https://imgur.com/a/lTs2WTU

The amazing thing was that until we cut it out, the majority of the fiber strands in this 288-fiber cable were still functioning! This made repair a bit tricky, because we had a small number of customers down due to the burned cable, but to restore it we had to take many more offline to cut out and replace the damaged cable section.

Sorry for the down-time! The main enemies of reliability for us have been electrical fires on poles, and squirrels chewing through our cables. Thankfully, both are pretty rare events.

[virtualmike]

JOOC, does the owner of the flaming streetlight pay for Sonic's cost to repair?